ST. LOUIS – In baseball, every area of the club is connected. That’s why manager Craig Counsell said Wednesday morning there’s nothing wrong with his bullpen that a more productive offense couldn’t fix.

The relief corps has had trouble protecting one-run leads late in games in the absence of injured closerCorey Knebel but Counsell said that has been the problem: nothing but one-run leads.

“The fact is that the closeness of all of these games has led to this as well,” Counsell said. “We haven’t had more than a one-run lead for more than an inning since San Diego.”

Counsell’s memory was correct on that topic. Since winning the finale against the Padres by a 7-3 score in that opening series, the Brewers had held a pair of two-run leads, but only for one inning, entering Wednesday. They led the Cubs, 4-2, in the fifth inning Friday after a pair of two-run homers by Eric Thames and Travis Shaw; and they held a 2-0 lead over St. Louis in the second inning Monday here.

All late leads had been only one run, and without Knebel the Brewers were 0 for 3 protecting them. They came back to win in 10 innings Monday but could not survive blowing one-run leads in both the ninth and 10th innings Tuesday.

That trend finally ended Wednesday but not before things got interesting in the ninth again. This time the offense provided a two-run lead – it was three runs earlier – but it dropped to one on Tommy Pham's lead-off homer off Josh Hader, who had been nearly unhittable of late.

"You knew it was going to be that way, right?" Counsell said of yet another nail-biter.

This time, the Brewers hung on behind Matt Albers, who became the first to convert a save in Knebel's absence.

"We've been in a lot of tight games and we're fighting in every one of them," Albers said. "A couple haven't gone our way but a couple have gone our way. As long as we keep battling, we're going to win more than we lose."

The last reliever to fail was J.J. Hoover, who blew the lead in the 10th Tuesday and surrendered a two-run homer in the 11th to Matt Carpenter that decided the game. Hoover paid a heavy price, getting designated for assignment Wednesday to allow the Brewers to call up reliever Jorge Lopez from Class AAA Colorado Springs.

“It’s a fresh arm today,” Counsell said. “We put J.J. in a tough spot yesterday. That was unfortunate. He was up quite a bit (in the bullpen) and went out there an inning-plus. The fact is the closeness of all of these games has led to this as well.”

Lopez was the fourth reliever summoned since Knebel went on the disabled list Friday. Adrian Houser has come and gone, as has Hoover. Taylor Williams, who struck out the side in the eighth inning Tuesday night, remains in the bullpen.

Beyond the closeness of games, Counsell has had to go to his bullpen often because starters have not been going deep into games. The starters have pitched 65 2/3 innings and the relievers 56 1/3 innings, workloads that should be farther apart.

“Every spot is a leveraged spot and every spot they are pitching in is a big spot,” Counsell said of his overworked relief corps. “They don’t have a big room for error. We played a lot of games like that last year and it has continued this year.”

To show how fragile jobs can be for relievers, Hoover was one strike away from pitching a perfect 10th inning and keeping his spot on the club. But, on a 3-2 count, he walked rookie Yairo Munoz, who had one hit for the season, and the next two hitters, Jose Martinez and Greg Garcia, collected singles to tie the game.

Asked if Hoover would still be on the team without that result, Counsell said, “Yeah, most likely. I don’t want to say for sure on that. It wasn’t because he pitched poorly. It was because we needed a pitcher here.”

“We need to score more runs to change this dynamic a little bit,” Counsell added. “The focus, to me, is we need to score more runs to change the nature of these games.”

In that regard, it hasn’t helped that the team’s big off-season acquisitions, outfielders Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, are injured. Yelich is on the DL with an oblique strain and Cain has been sidelined with a quadriceps strain. The Brewers scored only 44 runs in their first 13 games, ranking 11th in the National League.

The Brewers sent down outfielder Brett Phillips to add Junior Guerra to start the series finale, leaving Counsell to start Hernán Pérez in center field.

“We’ve been in some tough games, and we’re hanging in there in those games,” Counsell said. “It’s a challenging stretch but I feel that our heads are above water. When games end like this, they’re emotional. But I feel like we’re playing competitive baseball and exciting baseball. It’s edge-of-your-seat baseball at times.

“To make some of this stuff easier on everybody, scoring more runs is at the start of it, for me. We’re improving in the late-innings situations, offensively. We just need to provide a little more support early in games. You always anticipate things normalizing a little bit.”